Kelly Gissendaner will be first female executed in Georgia in 70 years at 7 p.m. Wednesday after her final attempt at clemency was turned back by the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier in the morning.
Gissendaner had hoped for a reprieve from the execution, admitting to her role in the February 1997 murder of her husband Doug Gissendaner Jr. Authorities said she planned the murder by convincing her boyfriend, Greg Owen, to kill him.
"There are no excuses for what I did,"
Gissendaner said in her statement in a 53-page clemency application, according to 11 Alive News. "I will never understand how I let myself fall into such evil."
Owen accepted a plea bargain and testified against Gissendaner; he is serving life in prison Georgia for Doug Gissendaner's murder.
Kelly Gissendaner wrote in her clemency application that she wanted to plead guilty but her lawyers told her that a jury would not sentence her to death
"because she was a woman and because she did not actually kill Doug," wrote CNN.
Doug Gissendaner was found in 1997 stabbed and beaten in a wooded area in Gwinnett County. At Kelly Gissendaner's behest, Owen forced Doug Gissendaner into the remote area where he beat him with a nightstick and stabbed him in the neck.
After they were arrested, Kelly Gissendaner tried to concoct a story that she was forced to the crime scene until her cellmate turned letters over to authorities about her plans.
Women being executed is still a rarity in the United States, with only 15 executed since 1977, but Gissendaner would be the third within the past 13 months.
Two of those executions happened in Texas. Suzanne Basso was executed Feb. 5, 2014, for the death of her boyfriend, and Lisa Coleman was executed on Sept. 17, 2014, for the death of a girlfriend's son.
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